10 Tools to Help You Learn More About Your Target Audience with Polls and Quizzes

Understanding your target audience is one of the all-important keys that unlocks the door to business success. The better you know your audience, the more effective your content decisions and marketing strategies will be. This can lead to more sales and higher customer retention.

Staying up to date with their wants, needs and preferences should be a top priority when seeking engagement and conversions. But it’s almost impossible to get a good understanding of your audience without data.

Traffic and demographic data is available from your analytics provider. But this only offers broad insights and is not enough to get to know your audience on a deeper level. A great way to learn more about the people engaging with your brand is to ask them questions. After all, if you don’t ask, you don’t get.

Surveys are tedious and feel like a chore to complete. Polls and quizzes are fun and engaging. And they can gather valuable insights and encourage sharing at the same time: a win-win!

What You Can Learn from Digging into Your Analytics Data

You can get a fair amount of data from your analytics providers. Traffic volume, most viewed content, demographics including age, gender and location. This data does provide a good understanding of your visitors.

Analytics tell you about their behaviour, changes in trends and user engagement. But whilst analytics may tell you “who” your audience is, it does not tell you “what” they think, feel and do. We need to dig deeper to discover this valuable information.

To have a clear understanding of your target audience, you need to find out their likes and dislikes. You need to know the products they use and what drives them. But this information is not available through analytics data alone.

The Trouble with Surveys

Traditional surveys simply don’t get people excited. The majority of people don’t look forward to surveys unless they are getting something in return. Yes, you can encourage users to complete a survey with an incentive. But that may skew the results as they may only be in it for the reward at the end.

Polls and quizzes are fun to take part in and can increase engagement. Participating in a poll or quiz is quick and easy. People can answer questions without the fear of being judged for their opinions. They can learn things, and enjoy themselves at the same time.

Quizzes also drive more traffic compared to long-form editorial content. They are more interactive and attract a larger audience through sharing.

Give your followers something to interact with and learn more about them at the same time using a poll or a quiz. They are easy to use on social media platforms as well as websites and emails, and you can cover a broad range of topics.

Gain feedback, show promotions, get to know your audience and the content they like, and give users something enjoyable to take part in. Polls and quizzes will humanise your brand, especially if you respond to the engagement that you receive.

Help! How Do I Run a Poll?

There’s loads of tools and apps out there to help you. Here’s some of our favourite tools for running polls.

Polldaddy

Create online polls and quizzes that work on Facebook, Twitter, via email and through your website using Polldaddy.

Customising your polls or quizzes to match your brand is easy. You can also add engaging images, videos and custom styling.

Kremsa Poll

This free poll app by Kremsa Digital is one of the most recognised. It’s widely used for polls on Facebook, though they can also be embedded into a website.

Customise polls in almost anyway you want to engage with your fans and reveal opinions on any topic.

TwtPoll

Though it is highly integrated with Twitter, TwtPoll works across many social platforms. Create a free or premium poll with many options such as video integration.

Twitter Polls

Twitter Polls are an easy way to get creative, interact with your audience and understand people’s opinions. Ask general lifestyle questions, get feedback on your business, find out product preferences and discuss trending topics. Twitter polls are rather simple and don’t offer the full analytics compared to other apps. But they can be useful for gaining quick information and engagement with followers.

Instagram Polls

Instagram also offers a very simple poll option as a feature in their Stories option. Ask a question via a poll and gather results from voters to get easy and quick, valuable insights.

Hello Fresh, the meal-kit delivery service, used the feature to find out which recipes and cooking ideas worked better with their audience. This then helped them with their product development.

WP Polls

If you run your website on WordPress you can create and embed a poll directly on your site using the free WP Polls plugin. Polls are easy to create and all the data is stored in the WordPress admin for easy access and reporting.

We’ve used this tool on Eco & Beyond to great effect to learn more about our audience of foodies and what makes them tick.

How About Creating Quizzes?

We’ve got a top list of tools for creating quizzes too!

Qzzr

One of the top quiz creation experiences, Qzzr quizzes are a great way to engage with an audience and generate leads. Putting together a quiz is easy using this platform and what’s more, it will look professional on any device.

Queezly

With quizzes, personality tests, polls and lists on offer, Queezly is easy and quick to use. Create them from scratch or choose from their many customisable templates.

Engageform

Engageform by 4screens offers quick and simple, well-designed desktop and mobile-friendly quizzes. Use a simple link for easy sharing on social media, or embed the quiz code on your website.

Every feedback detail is easily accessible in the form of stats and leads. Plus you can use lead generation to collect emails or redirect users to special offers.

Share on social media, on your website, or through your email system.

Playbuzz

Tell an interactive story through Playbuzz. They power some of the most engaging content on the internet. Create branded quizzes, flip cards, video snaps, polls and more through the app.

A Quiz or Poll Is Useless If You Don’t Ask the Right Questions

There is the potential to learn a lot about your target audience, but only if you ask the right questions. Not all polls and quizzes will get the same level of engagement or deliver the same degree of insight.

You need to frame your questions in a way that intrigues your audience and compels them to answer. But this depends greatly on what information you’re trying to glean. Establish a specific goal for your poll or quiz to come up with the all important question(s).

You have the choice of simple yes or no questions or more complex, open-ended questions. Both have advantages and disadvantages and it depends on the type of results you are looking for.

Getting the Right Mix of Question Types

Closed yes or no questions allow the user to reach a conclusion in a quick and efficient manner. There’s no time wasted or too much thinking involved. These types of questions are perfect for easy results. They are quick for both your audience and for you to collect feedback.

But they are not ideal when you want more information. They can also be frustrating for a user when the choices do not reflect their feelings, or they want to expand on their answer and offer suggestions.

Open-ended questions require the respondent to offer an explanation or point of view. The advantage is that you gain detailed insights which can be extremely useful. Plus you learn more about the opinions of your audience.

But collecting this data is much more complicated and needs more time and analysis to produce measurable results.

Using polls and quizzes to learn more about your audience is great for developing your brand. They are easy to create and keep your followers engaged with different types of content. You gain valuable information that will help you engage more with your audience, improve your strategy and increase conversions. Which is exactly what you want!

Sapling Digital Ltd.

Hungry for More?

Sapling uses the information you provide to send you regular content updates, news, offers and promotions about products and services. We won’t share your details with anyone else unless consent is given. You are free to unsubscribe at any time. For more info, check our privacy policy.